Freedom sweeps Europe - but at what cost?

The liberation of Europe was far from the clean sweep the US had hoped for. Amid many civilian casualties, it became clear that the Soviet Union was using the fallout to pursue its own agenda. By Antony Beevor

American troops heading for the D Day landings in Normandy. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Freedom sweeps Europe - but at what cost?

The liberation of Europe was far from the clean sweep the US had hoped for. Amid many civilian casualties, it became clear that the Soviet Union was using the fallout to pursue its own agenda. By Antony Beevor

A great sense of expectancy dominated Europe in the spring of 1944. Resistance groups in German-occupied countries across the continent burned with impatience. In many cases they wanted to take liberation through into revolution and settle accounts with those who had collaborated or profited. In some cases, especially in Poland, hope was overshadowed by foreboding at what a Soviet occupation would mean.

Stalin's hatred of the country since their victory on the Vistula in the Soviet-Polish war of 1921 meant that he intended to dominate the country totally and even absorb the eastern part into the Soviet Union. In 1940, at the time of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the NKVD secret police had tried to eliminate all potential opponents, including teachers, landowners, officers, lawyers and academics. The Polish government in exile raised the fate of the thousands of missing Polish officers, nearly 22,000 of whom had been executed on Stalin and Beria's orders, 4,400 of them in the forest of Katyn. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations. Both Churchill and Roosevelt felt forced to take Stalin's side purely to maintain the alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.

On the eastern front, the Red Army had advanced from the Ukraine into Romanian and Polish territory. It now began to prepare the most ambitious offensive of all against the Germans' Army Group Centre in Belorussia. In Italy, the Anglo-American forces were blocked at Monte Cassino and in the Anzio bridgehead, but this convinced the Americans that they were right to concentrate on the preparations to invade northern France.

Although Winston Churchill now fully supported the Normandy invasion, he tried in vain to oppose the American plan to mount a second invasion in the south of France, because that would mean taking forces from the Italian campaign. Churchill was set on the militarily impractical idea of continuing the advance up Italy and then striking north-eastwards through the Ljubljana gap to seize Vienna and pre-empt a Stalinist occupation of central Europe.

The Americans, not yet suspicious of Stalin, viewed this idea as British politicking and wanted to have nothing to do with it. They intended to finish the war against Nazi Germany as quickly as possible with a drive across northern Europe so that all their efforts could be switched to finishing the war against Japan. In May 1944, the western allies began to plan the postwar world with the governments in exile in London.

The first stage of the liberation of western Europe was to be fought in the skies, because the allies needed to establish air supremacy. The strategic bombing campaign against German cities, aircraft factories and refineries in fact served a dual military purpose, whatever the moral debate later. It had greatly helped the Soviet Union by forcing the Germans to withdraw the bulk of their fighter squadrons from the eastern front to defend the Reich. This gave the Soviets air superiority and prevented the Germans from carrying out air reconnaissance, thus enabling the Red Army to mount huge surprise attacks. But the bombing campaign also forced the German fighters into the air, where they could be taken on by the new long-range Mustangs escorting the Flying Fortress squadrons. By the early summer of 1944, the Luftwaffe was reduced to a skeleton.

The allies also needed to isolate the invasion region to hinder German supplies and reinforcements sent to the Normandy front. A plan known as "Transportation" involved bombing bridges, railway lines and marshalling yards. Churchill was horrified by the scale of French civilian losses, which he wanted limited to 10,000, but he was overruled by Roosevelt, who insisted that Eisenhower, the supreme commander, be given a free hand to reduce allied casualties later. In fact close to 15,000 were killed, and another 20,000 French civilians died during the campaign. Nearly 70,000 French were killed by allied bombing and shelling during the whole war, more than the total number of British non-combatants killed by the Luftwaffe and the flying bombs. The allies' reliance on massive bombing and shelling, in the hope of reducing their own losses to avoid angry questions at home, revealed perhaps the worst paradox of democracy at war.

It is too easy to look back on the Normandy landings of Operation Overlord and assume that success was inevitable because of the allies' overwhelming strength. In fact, the break in the weather that allowed the invasion to go ahead was critical. The German navy never put to sea on the night of 5 June, and despite the legend of "bloody Omaha", allied casualties were far lower than the 10,000 expected. With around 3,000 servicemen dead, the figure was no more than the number of French civilians killed that day.

War of attrition

But once German panzer divisions arrived, the British and American armies found themselves bogged down in a terrible war of attrition. The savagery of the fighting meant that the German casualty rates alone were double the average on the eastern front. General Montgomery was forced to make a virtue out of a very sore necessity. With his British and Canadian forces facing the bulk of the SS panzer divisions, all he could hope to do was to tie them down until the Americans were able to break through in late July, launching Operation Cobra. This drive southwards, parallel to the Atlantic coast, enabled General Patton's Third Army to break out into Brittany and then swing east towards the Seine.

Normandy was devastated by the fighting, but its martyrdom saved the rest of France from serious damage. Amid scenes of the wildest jubilation, General Leclerc's Second Armoured Division advanced into the centre of Paris on 25 August following a rising by the French resistance. De Gaulle had feared disorder not far short of civil war if communist groups tried to seize power. At the same time, Stalin did not want the Americans provoked by insurrectionary disorders in France behind their frontlines, in case they blamed the Soviet Union and cut off lend-lease supplies in retaliation. Jacques Duclos, the Comintern veteran, accordingly reined in the French Communist party. Stalin also felt that in exchange for his discouragement of revolution in France, the western allies should allow him a free hand in Poland.

De Gaulle's main fear was that any disturbance would give the Americans the opportunity to impose Amgot – the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories – on France. Roosevelt distrusted him and American commanders suspected that the French were more interested in their own politics than in carrying on the war against Nazi Germany. They were also sickened by the readiness of many French to denounce neighbours and rivals as collaborators and by the head-shaving of Frenchwomen accused of collaboration horizontale with German occupiers. The French, for their part, did not appreciate the naive arrogance displayed by many American soldiers and their evident belief that almost any woman could be bought. Mutual suspicions and resentments from this time were to sully Franco-American relations for far longer than anyone could have imagined at the time.

On the eastern front, meanwhile, the Red Army had launched Operation Bagration in Belorussia with 1.2 million men on 22 June. Hitler was taken completely by surprise. Tricked by a Soviet deception plan, he had switched forces to the south. Ten days later, Soviet forces entered Minsk, then, on 13 July, they took the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. That same day, Marshal Konev launched an attack from the Ukraine towards the southern Polish city of Lvov. And on 21 July, the Soviet Union announced the formation of a Polish committee of national liberation. The Polish government-in-exile in London denounced this as the first step towards imposing a puppet administration under Soviet control.

On 1 August, with Marshal Rokossovsky's forces on the Vistula opposite Warsaw, the Polish "Home Army" rose in revolt against the German troops defending the Polish capital. They hoped to seize the city as a base for the government-in-exile and thus pre-empt the imposition of a Soviet dictatorship. The Polish resistance was encouraged to rise against the Germans by broadcasts from Moscow, but it soon became clear that Stalin wanted the Home Army to be destroyed. Already in the areas of Poland occupied by the Red Army, the NKVD and Smersh were arresting non-communists as "saboteurs" or "counter-revolutionaries".

Rokossovsky's armies waited east of the Vistula, while the Germans brought in SS units to crush the Polish rising. Stalin, despite the appeals of Churchill and Roosevelt, also refused to allow airfields behind the Soviet front to be used by allied aircraft from Italy trying to drop supplies to the insurgents. Although without hope, the remnants of the Polish Home Army fought on with bitter bravery from the sewers and ruins of Warsaw. They finally surrendered on 2 October. Stalin had let the Germans do his dirty work for him.

Euphoria in the west

In September, following the liberation of Paris, a mood of heady euphoria infected almost everyone in the west, with the idea that the war would be over by Christmas. The Red Army was close to East Prussia and sweeping into the Balkans. The Romanians had surrendered. The Finns had sought an armistice with the Soviet Union. The British were dashing across Belgium towards Holland, Patton's Third Army had already reached the Moselle, and in the centre other American forces had crossed the border from Luxembourg on to German soil.

On 17 September, Montgomery, with uncharacteristic rashness, ordered paratroop drops on the bridges over the Maas, the Waal and the lower Rhine at Arnhem. The British XXX Corps would charge up the road to relieve them, but constant delays meant that they never got through. Also, British commanders discounted intelligence reports that two SS panzer divisions had recently moved to the area. Operation Market Garden, as it was called, collapsed after 10 days. All the exaggerated optimism earlier in the month evaporated. It was to be a hard winter for the allied troops along the German frontier and in Italy. The Americans were to suffer particularly badly in the fighting for the Hürtgen forest and combat exhaustion casualties mounted alarmingly.

After the Canadians and British had cleared the northern side of the estuary leading to Antwerp, the allies prepared to start using the port. Hitler decided to launch a major counterattack from the Ardennes forests with the aim of recapturing the city. In a typically reckless gamble, he saw this as his best chance of knocking the western allies out of the war. On 16 December, two panzer armies suddenly struck through the snow-covered pine forests, taking the weak American infantry divisions by surprise. Panic and chaos ensued. Allied aircraft were unable to take off in the freezing fog. As the Germans surrounded the key town of Bastogne, General Patton started to move his Third Army north with impressive speed. The battle changed dramatically in the Americans' favour when the German formations began to run out of fuel and the skies cleared to allow allied fighter-bombers to attack at will.

It was also a hard winter for the German population, which up to then had lived off the food supplies seized from occupied countries. Berliners, with their black humour, joked at Christmas: "Be practical. Give a coffin." But they knew that the military situation was desperate, with all males between 16 and 60 called up for service in the Volkssturm militia. They also knew that retribution from the Red Army would be terrible after the Wehrmacht's "war of annihilation" against the Soviet Union.

The Japanese also had little hope. In late October, they had tried to ambush the US Third and Fifth Fleets off the Philippines, but were decisively outfought in the battle of Leyte, which involved no less than 282 warships. The Americans succeeded in sinking the last four Japanese aircraft carriers, and effectively ended the power of the Imperial Japanese navy. Meanwhile, American bombers had begun to attack Japanese cities. Their Asian empire was crumbling. The Americans were fighting hard to evict the remaining Japanese troops from the Philippines while the British 14th Army advanced down into Burma.

On 12 January 1945, the great Soviet winter offensive began against East Prussia and along the line of the Vistula. Warsaw was taken and Soviet tank armies charged forward in a headlong advance all the way to the river Oder, just 60 miles from Berlin. To the south, Marshal Konev's armies seized Silesia and advanced to the river Neisse.

Nazi gauleiters refused to allow German civilians to flee, in many cases until it was too late. Some 8.5 million refugees from East Prussia, West Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia sought safety in the Reich, travelling on "treks" in farm carts and on foot through heavy snow. Others were evacuated in cattle trucks or on ships organised by the German navy from Baltic ports. More than 7,000 drowned when the liner Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine. During this massive migration, some half a million civilians are said to have died, and the fate of those women and girls caught by the Red Army was appalling, especially those trapped in East Prussia.

Even greater suffering was endured by concentration camp inmates, forced in inadequate clothing and without food on to death marches back towards Germany. Any who collapsed from the cold, exhaustion or starvation were shot on the spot by their SS guards. The Soviet advances had been so rapid that in most cases the SS had not been able to destroy much of the evidence of their crimes. On 27 January 1945, reconnaissance troops from Konev's armies came across Auschwitz, where a few hundred of the sickest prisoners had been left behind. They stared in disbelief at the skeletal figures, barely alive.

Fall of Budapest

While Marshal Zhukov regrouped his forces on the Oder during February and Marshal Rokossovsky started to clear Pomerania, the Hungarian capital of Budapest finally fell to Soviet forces after a bloody siege. In the rear areas behind Red Army lines, NKVD rifle regiments and Smersh detachments hunted down not only German sympathisers, but anyone who might oppose Soviet rule.

Although the Yalta conference early in February had ended in optimism, Churchill was soon horrified to hear of the repression carried out against non-communists. At Yalta it had been agreed that representatives of the Polish government-in-exile should have talks with the Soviet-backed Lublin administration, but they were arrested and imprisoned by the NKVD despite their safe-conduct passes. Protests to Stalin produced angrily dismissive responses. Roosevelt, already very ill at Yalta, was interested only in forming the United Nations organisation to guarantee a postwar peace. He had barely a month to live.

Churchill was increasingly preoccupied by the Soviet domination of central Europe. In October 1944, in an attempt to preserve Greece, he had made the so-called "percentage agreement", tacitly conceding to Stalin most of the Balkans, but excluding Greece. He had flown to Greece just before Christmas as British troops fought off communist ELAS guerrillas trying to seize control. Churchill had underestimated how much the Greek royal family was disliked, and a bitter civil war followed, but his tenacity at least saved Greece from becoming a Soviet satellite.

At Yalta, the Soviet Union also agreed to join the war against Japan as soon as Germany was defeated. The United States and Britain, shaken by the suicidal defence of Pacific islands, feared that storming Japan would cost up to half a million allied casualties. At that stage, nobody knew whether the new atomic bomb would work. In the meantime, General Curtis LeMay stepped up his bombing attacks. On the night of 9 March, he sent his Superfortress squadrons on a fire-bombing raid against Tokyo. The mainly wooden houses blazed into an inferno. It is estimated that 97,000 people died, 125,000 were injured and 1 million left homeless. On 6 April, US forces landed on Okinawa to seize it as a springboard for the invasion of Japan itself.

In Europe, the war was coming to a close. The western allies were across the Rhine and advancing towards the river Elbe when, on 16 April, the Red Army unleashed "the Berlin Operation". From Stettin on the Baltic to the Czech border, 23 Soviet armies with 2.5 million men opened a massive artillery barrage. Yet despite their overwhelming strength, Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front took six days before its artillery was within range of Berlin. Stalin had insisted on encircling the city first to make sure that the Americans would not get there beforehand from their bridgehead across the Elbe. But Eisenhower had decided to hold back his forces, to Churchill's exasperation.

As Soviet forces closed in on the centre of Berlin, Hitler committed suicide with his new wife, Eva Braun, on 30 April. The leadership of the Nazi state was transferred to Grand Admiral Dönitz in Flensburg, but his was a phantom government. The final surrender was signed in Berlin at midnight on 8 May.

Overwhelming problems

Although the Americans wanted to wind down their forces in Europe and switch them to the far east, the problems of a devastated Germany remained overwhelming. The first priority was to care for the survivors of concentration camps, whose conditions sickened allied troops. There were up to 20 million displaced persons, including more than a quarter of a million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, who needed transport home or accommodation.

In the far east, the Japanese defence of Okinawa continued until 21 June with fanatical intensity, while kamikaze pilots attacked the US navy offshore. The Americans had suffered 50,000 casualties. Plans for an invasion of Japan were put on hold after the first atomic bomb was tested successfully in New Mexico on 16 July. Two days later the allied leaders met at Potsdam. President Truman conveyed the news of the bomb to Stalin, who already knew of its existence through his spies.

The Japanese rejected calls to surrender, so on 6 August, the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later another was dropped on Nagasaki. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan and began to invade Manchuria. On 14 August, the Japanese agreed to surrender unconditionally and the final ceremony took place in Tokyo Bay on 2 September aboard the US battleship Missouri.

It was in Europe, however, where the tensions between the Soviet Union and the western allies would grow into the cold war, despite all of Roosevelt's hopes. An "iron curtain" had indeed come down, with all democratic parties behind it ruthlessly crushed by Stalinist power.

Antony Beevor is the author of Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson, Wolfson and Hawthornden prizes; Berlin: The Downfall; The Battle for Spain, which won the La Vanguardia prize and, most recently, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy